The goal of this project is to identify features in the way suicidal people think about themselves and their own death, features that distinguish them from non-suicidal people and features that are related to the seriousness of their suicide attempt. Suicide accounts for about 28,000 deaths a year in the United States. We expect to identify cognitive factors in suicide attempts so that intervention strategies for this significant health problem can be devised and evaluated in future projects. Several demographic and cognitive factors are related to the risk of suicide. Our purpose is to contribute to the understanding of the thinking style of suicidal individuals by exploring how learned helplessness, decreased death threat, and hopelessness relate to the lethality of their suicide attempts and by exploring how these factors distinguish suicidal and non-suicidal individuals. We will interview 60 patients who have been hospitalized for attempted suicide within 48 hours of their being hospitalized. They will complete the Suicidal Intent Scale, the Risk-Rescue Rating Scale, the Attributional Style Questionnaire to assess helplessness, the Threat Index to assess fear of death, Beck's Hopelessness Scale and Beck's Depression Inventory. As a control group, 60 patients who are hospitalized with a diagnosis of depression will complete the same questionnaires (with the exception of the Suicidal Intent Scale and the Risk-Rescue Rating Scale). These depressed persons will be psychiatric inpatients who are not hospitalized because of an attempted suicide. Multivariate analysis will be used to compare the suicidal and non-suicidal groups' levels of helplessness, death threat, depression, and hopelessness. Using the same scores, canonical correlation will be used to predict the seriousness of the suicide attempts.